The Making Of John Kerry

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Richard Kerry, John's father, was 6 years old at the time of his father's suicide. He would also lose a sister, to cancer, and that crush of grief seems to have hardened his personality enough that his children would have a hard time penetrating it years later. "He didn't share emotions easily," Kerry says. The Kerry kids never knew the full story of their grandfather until the Boston Globe published its account last year. "I knew he committed suicide, but I never knew the how or why. I never really asked. I sort of figured overdose." Neither did Kerry know that his grandfather was a Jewish convert to Catholicism. "I was not aware of the name change. And obviously, I wish my mother and father were alive to ask them." Only in his father's last years did Kerry talk to him a bit about the past. "I think my dad was really upset about the loss of not only his father, but ultimately his sister, and I think it had a lot of impact on him. Just a sadness. I sensed there was a big hole."

Richard Kerry nonetheless did well by any standard, attending Andover and Yale and then Harvard Law School. He met Rosemary in the summer of 1938, when he was in Europe taking a sculpture class. She was planning to become a nurse; he was heading into the Army Air Corps to become a test pilot. John Kerry likes to tell the story of his brave mother, trapped in France as the Nazis overran the country. "She was working in Paris as a nurse taking care of refugees, wounded, right up until the last day when the Germans came in," he told TIME. "She escaped on a bicycle with her sister and foraged and fled her way to Portugal and got on a ship to come over here." She and Richard were married in 1941, and they had a daughter Margaret (Peggy). Richard's test-pilot career soon ended when he came down with tuberculosis. He was sent to Colorado in hopes that the air there would speed his recovery, and that is how John Forbes Kerry came to be born in Denver in December 1943.

The truth about Kerry's roots — that they are as much new striving immigrant as Old Yankee aristocracy — may help explain why he didn't grow up steering by the same stars as many sons of privilege. As a kid, he wore his ambitions on his sleeve, reflecting the instincts of his refugee grandparents but violating the code of languid grace sanctified by Eastern aristocracy.

ROOTS AND WINGS
Kerry has a colorful personal story, but Bush possesses a clear one, and he never misses a chance to turn it to advantage. Being a Texan is a big part of being George W. Bush. His father could extol pork rinds and have a Houston mailbox, but few people really thought of him as anything but a Connecticut Yankee. Though W. was born in Connecticut while his father was at Yale, he grew up in Midland, Texas, a dusty town of new wealth and old values, lots of bikes and baseball and frog hunting and friends for life. As a result he has much more twang and sand and sky in him. For years, people could ask him the difference between himself and his father, and he offered just a one-word answer: "Midland."

Kerry cannot be so easily situated in the public mind. He may be the Senator from Massachusetts, but he is not from Massachusetts. He is not really from anywhere; his father's legal and diplomatic career meant that the family moved every few years. Now he talks about deep roots nourished through summers on Cape Cod with all the various cousins, and says people have made too much of the moving around — even though he famously had to shop for a congressional district the first time he ran for public office, in 1972, because he didn't really have a hometown.